Matt Dillon may have received a lifetime achievement award in Locarno on Thursday, but he still has “things to do”. And he wants you to know that.
“The first thing I thought was, ‘Oh my God, this is really cool. Then Dillon says, “I don’t feel like I’m just done!” diverse before the ceremony. But he admits it’s been around for a long time, having made his first movie, “Over the Edge” by Jonathan Kaplan in 1979.
We were a group of actors playing juvenile delinquents, staying at the Holiday Inn in Colorado where the McDonald’s slaughterhouses are. One day we came across that old man, a landscape painter, who worked on The Wizard of Oz. It was like running into Mozart.”
Curious about it all, he was impressed by seeing the characters come to life and the idea of reflecting human nature from the start.
“Someone was suggesting I was a ‘child actor.’ I wasn’t! I didn’t become an actor because I felt like: ‘Mom, I want to sing,'” he says.
“My family had no background in the show business. But once I started, it never occurred to me that it wouldn’t happen again. It was very normal. Many actors would tell you the same thing. I think it’s because we don’t know what to do.” .
Dillon – who earned an Oscar nod for his performance in “Crash” – was looking for casting heavyweight Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift or James Dean, trying to do his research and “find the character.”
“Improvisation, spontaneity, and vulnerability were important to us early on,” he says. Later he was attracted to the spontaneity of another artist, Cuban singer Francisco Filov. In 2020, he completed a documentary about his life, “El Gran Fellove”, which is his second film as a director after “City of Ghosts” which was made 18 years earlier.
“I’m so proud of this movie. I think I’m a good director, I have to say. I really believe it. But it’s never easy, because I don’t like compromising. That doesn’t mean I’m not flexible, I am, but I don’t want to compromise my convictions.”
He believes he will be shooting another movie in the future, he says.
“I love working with actors. I love playing with other people, they say, and you learn things about yourself too. Someone said it’s the best job and worst job, but it’s really the standout job in the movie. More than a writer, more than an actor. We’re just department heads in the end “.
However, there are new acting projects coming as well, from Apple’s series “High Desert” with Patricia Arquette to Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” about an astronomy conference set in a fictional desert city. The film also stars Margot Robbie, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Hanks.
“The good thing about working with Wes, who is such a brilliant guy, is that I admire him and I love him as a person. That makes it easy for you, because you can only trust this director to see. You know he is attentive.”
Despite Anderson’s unique visual style, Dillon wasn’t afraid to disappear into the background, he says. Or rather, he enjoyed it.
“I like to disappear in a movie, in character. That’s what I want to do. I’m not showy by nature, so I don’t need to be front and center,” he says, referring to another famous collaborator.
When I worked with Lars von Trier [on ‘The House That Jack Built’]The process was also very useful. It creates rules and then breaks them, because they have to be broken. Also, Lars has a good sense of humor – he kicked me out a few times in this movie.”
However, he still chooses Gus Van Sant to be the filmmaker who made the biggest impression on him, he says. Apart from “Ghost Town”, Dillon presented their movie “Drugstore Cowboy” at the Swiss Festival.
“I was really Coppola revered, but he was a paternal figure to me. When I worked with Van Sant, we were a lot closer. I was really able to absorb things from the way he works,” he adds, describing himself as an artistic ‘sponge’ whose creativity is lush. But it is not organized.
“I have a lot of ideas and it’s one of my strengths, but I learned a lot when I made this documentary. My curiosity about Cuban music is vast, but the audience can’t absorb all of this data. There has to be an emotional connection first.”
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